Nobody is perfect. If you for some reason think that this doesn’t apply to you, it is because you are a narcissist or so puffed up on your own pride that you can’t see the truth.

This is a fact: we can never be perfect. There will always be something that we are failing at. It is the orientation of our souls that we are worried about, individual moments will come and go. They are tests to reveal to us where we still fall short.

When I was younger I was very conceited. I thought I had all the answers, religion was stupid, and people that believed in the bible were ignorant. How little I knew. Inside of that book is a good path, one which if you align yourself to you have a target that can help you perfect your soul.

There are certainly issues with how we use the book, but they mostly lie within our own understanding. For example, the word meek is often misunderstood to be someone who is quiet and inoffensive. The complete opposite is true, meekness means you hear the voice of God, and you do what it says. As the prayer goes, Shema (שמע) Yisrael. Hear and do.

These days I strive very much to be a meek individual.

The word emunah (אמונה) is sometimes translated as faith, but more properly means strength of connection to God. For me, this gets enhanced when I fast; one of the primary motivators of why I do it frequently. The health benefits are just a great side effect.

For this last fast, which ended up being 8 days, I at first didn’t know why I needed to do it. I prayed, and a few days in I realized it was about a message I had gotten the day before I started. “It is your lack of discipline in self-control you are missing.”

Throughout the fast, events occurred which caused me to test my self-control; tests for which I passed, tests for which I failed. I had already decided that the 8th day was going to be my last the night before; my reasoning turned out to be sound. The 8th day was probably the hardest day out of them all. I was completely depleted.

As I entered into the evening I knew it was time to pray and meditate on what I had learned during this time. It ended up revealing to me the root causes of my lack of self-control. With the help of a surprise visit from the רוח הקודש I was able to isolate those areas.

They stemmed from what I had witnessed in my parents in childhood, actions I had taken in my formative teenage years, and negative patterns I have utilized my entire life. Powerful memories at the base of the foundation of my mind. Complex networks that spidered over my entire brain, deeply woven in. Several involved networks that branched down to nodes in my amygdala; the roots of defensive reaction. Some integrated with hormonal triggers to my adrenal system. I had never seen such a network inside myself before.

Sometimes in the past I have taken drastic action and just deleted whole stacks of memories to overcome my issues. This time I hovered over deleting them; but didn’t want to destroy my childhood; myself. I didn’t have to. This time I applied a different method, with assistance. The spirit traced over all the pathways, chilled rage, reorganized whole systems. Masterful. The whole of it came out in once piece.

The master says,

That morning I had prayed, and what I was told was to be kind. I pondered on that and acted on it during the day as usually what it means. After though I remembered this teaching. I realized that I needed to replace the old with new code, lest random code come back and leave me worse than before. I remembered what I had been told in the morning. Revelation.

I once again sat and prayed. I went back through in my mind times when I have acted without self-control. I replayed all of those scenarios and determined how instead, I could have been kind. As I did this, I could feel my mind weaving itself back together. Patch applied.

I do believe a deliverance has begun as the pattern that covered my entire body was removed, and I applied a replacement. The proof will require putting my reactions to experiment and seeing the results. Changes like this do require a time to bake in, a crucial transitory period where my will is required to keep the changes in place. I sure hope the patch holds.